


Numbers Never Lie

by VinstonCup



Category: Cars (Movies)
Genre: A little of it for Nat and Cruz anyway, Fluff, Lots of Piston Cup history, Natalie gets backstory, Nonbinary Character, The video game tracks are canon because I said so, workplace harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 09:56:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17180768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VinstonCup/pseuds/VinstonCup
Summary: A season after the meteoric rise of the Next-Gens, Natalie Certain writes a little retrospective for RSN.





	Numbers Never Lie

That scrape in the pavement is still there. I didn’t look at it when it was fresh - by the time I turned my hood away from the scoring sheets, high in the RSN box, so comfy, the safety crews were coming to him. It has to be six, seven, eight car lengths. About a hundred and thirty feet of gritty asphalt, then, all of it grinding away bits of his metal like a belt sander.

I want to stop looking, but here on that same level of the Los Angeles suites as I was 363 days ago, I also don’t. Until the host calls my name. “Miss Certain? Table for one again?”

It’s only then that I look up. At the 1:1 sculpture of Strip Weathers suspended from the stucco ceiling of the Dinoco Pit Stop, naturally, then the autographs, photos, old race programs on the geometric-wood wall behind a big table in the far corner. None of it was this shined up last year, I don’t think.

“Actually, five,” I utter, and as soon as I see the clock strike six the patrons cheer and Cruz rolls in. She called me before final practice about how she’s had interviews, yeah, quick studio pieces for RTV or radio or PistonCup.com about the points chase and prep back at the shop, and they were just like she always used to imagine in front of the mirror as a little kid in Texas but one of these fancy profiles? In the shadow of Hollywood? Oh boy oh boy, she felt like such a star she went out and bought me a little snowglobe from Graumann’s. What a keeper.

It’s been half a season and - if I may gush just a bit - I still have to take in how cute she is with that blade spoiler, that new paint job with the numbers moved back a bit from where they were in April, that toothy giggly smile that’s still the same and she kisses me out of the trance. “It’s all on me tonight. You don’t even have to help calculate the tip this time.”

Out past the entryway, we spot something blue. The angle of the camera looks off, but Ralph Carlow’s snapping pictures with a couple of young fans regardless. “Hey, enjoy the show tomorrow!” He waits for them to say goodbye, left front tire bouncing a little, then sprints to us. “You study up for this, Reb?” He looks back, cocking his brow at the empty space. “Reb? You gonna be okay here?”

Reb Meeker and Chase Racelott slink in side-by-side. “Yeah, I’m great,” Meeker mutters. “Definitely didn’t get a mic shoved in my mouth by some nutcase Dodge that wouldn’t shut up about the Sidewall Shine rumors.” They laugh soft. “Not me.”

“Were they from PSI?” Chase asks, and he hears Reb sigh. “You gotta just tune them out sometimes.”

We all say our hellos and settle around the table, and Cruz and I decide to split a mega can of octane 89 fuel with a dash of peppermint. Ralph is torn between the Light oil and the Synthetic until Chase cuts in - “You gotta try Light with some caramel apple, man. I always mix a couple of cans before I go camping.” - and Reb orders E15 with a sugar-free Transberry Juice on the side. Even with Junior Piston Pro cars whipping around turn one at 160, the speedway looks content, reservedly still, like it’s just waking up for the big day. I think it’s time we get going.

“Oh, you had to start with that,” Ralph says with a laugh when I bring up last year’s Dinoco 400. “I think I just barely saw the white flag when I looked over to the inside and - who the heck was this guy?”

Reb shrugs.

“Y’know?” Ralph continues. “This...this guy with carbon ceramic brakes and a hybrid system and headlights that looked like...looked like...anyway, I stayed for autographs for a while after, and everyone was just like, how the heck did he even get approved?”

I notice Chase, just looking down at his Sludge Cola, taking light sips.

To say that he and the Next-Gens were a bit misunderstood by some fans when they reached high-profile racing is to put it softly. Even before they all moved up, there were pickups and Town Cars calling into radio shows at their dive bar, sometimes quivering like they’d been told their house was getting repossessed, _where the heck is the rulebook? Where is tradition?_

The truth, of course, is what I tell Chase. The truth, of course, is that there’s still an old film reel, if you show your press card at the Piston Cup media archives in Charlotte and ask to go way into the back, of Big Jack sitting at the head table of the office saying “Run what you brung. Or rather, run what you got built with. I know what people are sayin’ about this Weathers fella and his big ol’ wing and his nose, but when we signed the papers ten years ago we did not go into it with the idea of cuttin’ off everyone’s natural-born, God-honest skills until they all ran the same laps. If someone’s new, then dangit, they’re new. We’ll take a look at the rules, but we will _not_ make all our boys and girls out there look like cutouts. You can go take a drive right now if that’s what you’re in here for.” And he’d made sure the board stuck to that. A lot of cars forget what things like Mario Andretti’s roll cage in ‘67, Kraig Shiftright’s restrictor plate in ‘72, James Cleanair’s shorter wheelbase in the early ‘80s and Misti Motorkrass’ fiberglass bumpers in ‘91 were. Not some userpolled exception just to out-tune the old stalwarts, but an adjustment tailored to who these cars already were. To this day, when you get your Piston license, your racing engine still must be based on the one you rolled out of the factory with. Hybrids? Well, yes. Tradition was only continuing.

“That’s what my dad kept telling me. For a while.” Chase finally speaks up, glancing at a poster of one Bill Racelott under the checkers at the 1987 Florida 500. He’s going past a couple of lapped cars, a swoopy, curvy ‘69 Dodge and an ‘84 Axello that’s much squarer, much more like him. “The first time he got on the grid at Georgia...must have been mid-’70s...most of the field looked at him like he had five hoods. But his body style was just that boxy when he was born; his model year wasn’t for another five or ten years maybe. Not that he went out and lapped the field at first.”

I hadn’t learned any of this when I left my silver office at MPH 55 News a few years ago. There was a kind of soothing reassurance in watching business trends dip just the way they were supposed to after working to get the formula right for an hour. Watching the numbers. I didn’t make a lot of lunch-break friends over there, if I may be honest - they all gushed too loud about their date nights and their bar crawls and their Christmas vacations at little motels but _actually,_ I remember saying one day, _SleepWell stock is down a point and a half today._ They all looked at me like I was a UFO, and a month later I was rolling into RSN’s Charlotte studio. Maybe I had to think hard to remember what “wedge” or “apron” meant at first, but it was just a relief to be anywhere I could start new. I heard little rumbles around town that I couldn’t make sense of despite all efforts - _What a career Kevin had, his dad and grandpa must be so proud...The 21 bunch is keeping Comet another year? Who’s running that place, the Racingtire family?...I miss Hud. I miss Hud so much..._ but what I could sit down and grapple with were the numbers. Tire pressures, quality passes, how many times X number of cautions had happened after X amount of laps. They were always there, and they were always just what they were. 3 has meant 3, 51 has meant 51, 100 has meant 100, since time began. Numbers never change. Numbers never lie.

I wasn’t in the room for that one badly managed focus group, though. The one from two Novembers ago where Sam Putterson about knocked his shiny new Piston Cup CEO badge off the table fumbling for a drink. The one about _youth market saturation_ and _brand engagement with young personalities_ and _these stupid kids today don’t want to read about tire falloff and fuel mileage and pit strategy, Mark, they just want to see speed._

_Oh, and wings. Big giant wings like the, uh, the street racers. Kids eat that up, right? Mark?_

“Yeah, Bill didn’t have the ‘15 package,” Reb ribs, and I remember where I am. “He actually had to think. How’d he ever survive?” They bump into the table a little, jolting back in a quick panic.

“What package?” Cruz blurts, and the other racers’ lips upturn as if to laugh but she doesn’t laugh. “Oh, I, uh, my boss didn’t...let me watch the races last year...” She blinks hard twice, smiles that gorgeous smile again. “I’m--I’m really asking. What was the package?”

“Oh, you’re alright.” Ralph smiles, rolls his eyes, not at her but at that unseen funk in the air, and gestures to her calmly. “I think the fans that watched every lap forgot it was there, because it kind of got phased in...Junior had it every race from the start, but Cup didn’t get it full-time until Copper Canyon last year...and...and who was it? Bearingly?”

“Swift.” I hope I didn’t come in too loud. “Then Bearingly.”

“Yeah, they were fed up with the tapered spacers and the hard tires and everything by April. We all were. But get this, Cruz - they said one thing on camera about how hard it was to pass and the execs fined them thirty thousand a pop.”

“No way.”

“I called them both up first thing the next morning. They didn’t say anything wrong; we were going everywhere from Virginia to Rocker Arms to stinkin’ Smasherville and the spacers were choking our engines down. We never had to go off the throttle. Never had to think about how soon to let off, how hard to arc it in, how to brake.” He’s spitting words as fast as he drives by now. “There was no more trying to make your tires last longer than the other cars anymore, no talking to the crew about spring rates, and oh yeah, there happened to not be a single fuel mileage race the whole year. Remember DataShift?”

Reb doesn’t look at him. “I do not remember DataShift and I never will.”

“Storm was gonna run out and McQueen was gonna catch him. It was happening. He came in for his last stop way too early, he was running way too hard, and I heard him sputter a couple times with five or six to go. Then the caution happened and everyone had to come in. Could you see any metal in turn 3? I couldn’t!”

Reb shrugs again.

“Was that his sixth straight win or his seventh?” I ask, remembering the bad press that started to creep up about Lightning McQueen around this time. He was done, he was slow, the rookie class was a ballistic missile locked onto his crusty old bumper. This right after cars whose model year was 2014 or earlier took second through fifth.

“You say that like we were still counting,” says Reb, slower, cleaner. “Storm, Storm, Storm, every race, every time. It was just reality...we thought. Because how were we supposed to figure out that he’d never had to conserve a gallon of gas or do a side draft or nurse a blowout back to the pits for his entire career…” They open their mouth, pause, look up to the merch on the walls for a moment, two, three, as though calling on ghosts for the right words. “...when all those elements had been written out of play for a year or two?” They look down.

Ralph fills the silence. “The kid has loads of speed, don’t get me wrong. But he was also pretty lucky he didn’t need anything else at first. Just held the optimal racing line…”

“...every single lap,” we groan in unison. Even me.

I suppose I didn’t help matters when I was asked for the first time, in June of that year, to actually go down into the garages. It was Rustbelt, the two-miler carved into those dewy hills just south of Detroit, and I was three minutes early. Draftsky almost bumped into me going through the gate. The 70 team had just hired Richie Gunzit, that fresh-faced son of a tractor farmer out of Shawnee, Kansas, and neither I nor the twenty Mulvihill fans lined up at the garage door with autograph books knew that until it opened. I drove on eggshells past the crowd, eyes locked on the kid. “Natalie Certain, RSN.” The questions and angles I’d been handed were fresh in my mind. “When the green flag drops on Sunday, forty...forty-two percent of the field will be comprised of fast young racers in their first year of Cup competition. Do you like…” 

And I think that’s when I first heard a gasp. A wobbling suspension.

“Do you like your chances?” The sound of someone backing away, slow, and I finally looked back but then Richie thanked Gasprin, thanked his crew, thanked the fans because what else was he going to do? And I got it down. He did it in that hushed awkward voice, in retrospect, the kind people use for protection when things are wrong. He did it when he looked, really looked, at the blue and yellow number 70 antenna balls, door decals, moms with their twins that traveled a thousand miles for this. When I didn’t.

Georgia, DataShift, Heartland, Alabama, Palm Mile...racers with storied careers who called this sport their home kept disappearing but I stayed in my spot, just calculated, every week, never felt flying rubber on a restart or heard the sounds of the crowd when the flag fell, and the formulas, projections, numbers said the Next-Gens were faster, the old racers should go. And that was just the way it was, right? Nothing is separate from the laws of science, right? There must have been bitter, stubborn old scholars trying to find sets of derivatives that would make the limits unequal back when L’Hopital’s Rule first got published, right?

Derivatives never decided to take your best friend away.

Derivatives didn’t make that scrape. 

Cruz gives me a cute little peck. “Here’s to tomorrow. Mr. McQueen says hi, by the way.” Oh, right. The fuel’s here.

“I was in the garage for a busted oil line way before it happened; I still had some on me but it was...” Ralph wobbles his front wheels quick, digs into the Dinoco Light and swallows quick. “...it was whatever. I don’t think she was gonna let me go until the crash, honestly...I know Lightning; he doesn’t ever give up and that bit him. We could see it on the replay, you know…” He gets quieter, but is just as quick. “His face, his exhaust glowing, the tire marks. The pitties looked back at me and we all just, well...was this all it was gonna be for my kind of racer? Trying so hard to stay up there that we broke ourselves?”

“Bearingly would have died for that kind of courtesy.” Reb takes a sip. “They texted him.”

I turn to Reb. “And you?”

“I was, like, 23rd the whole day. A week or two later I told Mr. Runabout he deserved someone who ran better.”

There had to be some diagnosis for this. I made a right onto MLK Boulevard out of the RSN building, went maybe 700 feet to headquarters and asked if there was something else Sam’s archivists could give me, any data about laps led or top tens that I’d somehow forgotten to plug in. I stood there, motor rattling louder than it ever had, but he just looked back to make sure John Lassetire (who, before I forget, was chucking garbage for a living a week later) was the only other car in the room. The head honchos had a commercial shoot to oversee, Sam said. This really really funny one where Rich Mixon thinks a dozen fangirls want to smooch him but they all drive past and smooch a big bottle of Tank Coat instead. Hilarious. I repeated my concerns - never mind that Mixon had never finished higher than 17th in the Juniors - and he stared _through_ me, like he’d never seen red paint before, then at my press card. Said it was so beneath an analyst as fantastic as me to... _overreact_ like this, pawed at the thing with his tire the exact way a bulldozer digs into the ground. Stat sensation Natalie Certain didn’t get _emotional._ She did math.

Maybe I had just overreacted - yes, I thought, that had to be it. So I sucked it up, faced the facts, did the only job I knew how to do, and the info-hungry racing world got to see...McQueen running scared from demolition derby hooligans. Got to see that figure based on the same formulas from before, the same dumbed-down rules. _One point two percent._

“You know how plate races are,” says Chase after rolling what must be a particularly delicious swig of caramel apple around his tongue for a few seconds. “Different.” He isn’t wrong. Florida and Alabama, for those new fans reading this, have had their own separate rule set since restrictor plates were mandated for their races in 1986. “I flew into Daytona Beach feeling pretty good. By the end of first practice I was thinking we could definitely get a top-five.”

Cruz leans closer. “Nothing else?” Chase doesn’t have an answer yet.

“Was there maybe a sense that things would be business as usual?” I ask.

“What, you mean a sense that our teams had replaced the whole field trying to beat Jackson Storm and after almost a year they were as far behind him as they were before?”

The more Storm cut down his times in practice, the more I felt it, too. He led 35, 45, 55 laps straight from the green. McQueen, bless his engine, was up to 12th by that point but got no further. Curbler, Swervez, Dover and the like all took their best lines, partnered up for their best drafting runs, but it was nothing we hadn’t seen from them before; even their fastest speeds wouldn’t have beat what they ran at Alabama last fall. The chances were slim for anything to happen that would be, pardon the term, unpredictable. 

Until it did. 

Yes, there had been mid-race competitor swaps before. Yardley for Cleanair in ‘07. Guenther for Schooner in ‘96. But those cars always had stats, and except for that one win on dirt, Cruz had nothing. Nothing. There’s no corollary to the quadratic formula, no way to set the value of _t_ or _n_ for a right-tailed test, for when a shiny yellow rookie you’ve never seen _anywhere_ before cuts through the field like a band saw.  
  
Let alone a rookie taught not just by simulators and marketers, but by the champion everyone had spent the offseason betting against. The one who, when kids wet behind the mudflaps ask him how to make it in this great sport, says to get your tires dirty.

“The thing about the simulators…” Cruz interjects at one point, quick, like this has been buzzing around in her head gasket for a while, “the pro-grade ones that teams use, anyway...is they were built for their physics engine to be lightyears ahead of anything in plain old video games...the devs focused on getting that right first. But on most of the models you see in race shops, putting any more than one AI car in is gonna crash the system. Let alone a whole field, like in...you know. A real race.”

Chase presses his lips together and looks up. “Would have been nice of some people to tell me that before they stuck me on sims during every practice session.” 

“Yeah.” Cruz gives a nod. “Even the ginormous one I used to run at the Rusteze shop couldn’t handle more than four or five.”

“Danny and Bubba told me the same thing,” says Chase, “but all their team owners ever said was, hey, this is how the 20 team does it so we’re gonna do it too, right? Geez.”

Is it any wonder that she picked her fellow rookies off so fast, when she was the only one really learning how to navigate lapped traffic? Or enter a crowded pit road? Or draft?

On our third date, she told me she had no idea if she would land the flip. When she was pinned to the wall, a thousand feet from the checkers, at the speedway grandmas have told their babies about since before the first Camaro was born, she couldn’t think about trajectory or centripetal force or inertia. Just Doc.

“So when I won, what were you thinking?” Cruz asks, biting her lip as if to try and contain that supernova of a smile, almost bouncing on her front tires. And I remember. Her breathlessness in the awe that she had done this for real, her fulfillment, her jubilation, gushing like a waterfall in the whoops over the radio when she did those extra-smoky donuts, donuts over the same asphalt that carried McQueen, Gorvette, Earnhardt, Shiftright, Cartrip, Weathers, Heming, Hudson into our storybooks. I remember Cartrip himself, that jabber-jawed master of short track setups, saying he was speechless and I remember, right after, something telling me to roll out into the stands. I remember the crowd.

Rejoicing.

Rejoicing sweet and rapturous as though, at once, all 243,759 of them had finally come home. Rejoicing because none of them saw this coming. Maybe Putterson was wrong. Maybe legend and grit and oil and family were the reason the numbers happened, not the other way around. Maybe being emotional was the whole point.

“Not much.” I cozy up to her. “For once.”

Speaking of Sam, I still haven’t found out exactly what sort of “public indecency” it was that got him arrested two days after the race, what they found in the metal tumbler, but I don’t want to. In much the same way we go to sleep I only remember the event because of what came before and after. Winford Bradford Rutherford, that early-aughts Cup standout who’d logged so much Ivy League lab time that the racers he drafted off flawlessly were calling him the Professor by his sophomore year, was named the new director of competition. The ‘15 package was gone.

Reb stifles a laugh. “Yeah, the board was a year or two behind on common sense.” They wait for the feeling to pass, lean in for a sip. “He’d been trying to get them to do the right thing forever.”

So Cruz took the second race of the year at Treadwell too, with that quick bump-and-run at the white flag. Storm came back at Petroleum City, Cruz won at the South with Chase second. Storm, Cruz, Cruz. The next race, when that red hauler came through the gate, when the practice times were top-of-the-board for a few minutes, when the laps went into the hundreds on Sunday and he not only stayed on the track this time but was barely outdueled by his protegé - and no one else - the last few doubters of number 95 went silent.

And yes, the rumors are true. Rutherford noticed what all the fans noticed in that amateur video on Blinkr that got a million hits, Treadless’ wing popping his trunk upward, his roof flaps sitting there helpless, when he spun and launched ten feet at the Rustbelt test. And the same exact thing in the Harvey Rodcap flip not an hour later. The board, to hear certain insiders tell it, had decided on a change by the next Monday.

“The new spoiler felt good.” I ask Chase to elaborate. “Well, it didn’t feel good when I got wrecking-loose off of 2 in first practice and Mitch had to talk me out of thinking I let the team down, but it felt good when I got back to the pits after a bunch of good laps and caught my breath. It felt like...I earned them. Like I had to work to catch myself now.”

Then Smasherville happened. Turn 2, final lap. I still wish Mixongate wasn’t the name that stuck.

 “I guess nobody ever told Rich when the leaders come by and you’re three laps down like you’ve been the whole month, you just move and...and for Pete’s sake, you _hold your line_ at least. Or if they did, he just didn’t understand. It’s not like his aero was off; it’s Smasherville! It’s half a mile! The pole lap was what, 105?” Chase speaks like he was right there to witness the injustice, the bobbing, weaving, left right left for three straight laps by the 36, Cruz up to his door and the swerve. The eyes that never bothered to look back once. The smoke.

 “I was this close to crashing,” says Cruz, so matter-of-fact that she almost seems excited to remember. “Yeah, okay, Storm beat me, but I saved it, right? That was cool.”

 Wells Runabout didn’t even have that to smile about. Even if the racer he’d just signed to a two-year deal with Tank Coat hadn’t loaded up onto the hauler with damage for the fourth time in nine career starts, he’d still have finished 30th or worse for the sixth.

 “You know what makes a great birthday gift for a team owner whose racer just made the dumbest move of the decade? Not a new phone.” Reb is wiping away with a bright green rag at something I can’t see. “Maybe half of the agents he called even picked up. I think the damage to the team had been done at that point; no one was gonna take a chance except...”

 I gesture to them. “Someone that already had?”

 “I still remember when you passed me,” Chase tells them. “I think that was when I asked the team if we could maybe have more than ten minutes of actual track time in practice next week.”

Reb finished fifth that Sunday, making sure to visit McQueen in victory lane. It was two hours later, as I recall, just before I got on the plane back home, that Darrell called me about the Todd Marcus rumor. When Todd went in for a struggling Jonas Carvers and cracked the top ten two weeks later, Chip Gearings came back for the BNL 525. This was starting to be more than an experiment.

 Even in early spring I’d seen pieces fly across the RSN newsroom about the same thing Chase had noticed before the 500, about how maybe this tidal wave of a youth movement hadn’t quite backed its hype up with that many results, about how a grand total of two Next-Gens had ever actually won. They slowed down when he finally got his. I was there in victory lane when he dedicated the Backfire Canyon 300 to Bill, the guy that raised him on the bullrings and dirt tracks. I was there to see the warm embrace from his whole crew. “They said they were done skimping on practice,” Chase tells me once he finishes his fuel.

Other youngsters got the 24 team’s message - some some stubborn ones didn’t, heading back to lower-rung series before too long - and I don’t think I need to say how amazing this year’s been, how many races have made us all have to catch our breath. Dover at Smolcic. Carlow at Grandol. Wheelhouse at Rustbelt. Ramirez at DataShift. Bearingly at Virginia. That’s just off the top of my head gasket.

I pour over tomorrow’s entry list as Cruz covers the bill. When she and Storm settle the title, eighteen Next-Gens and eighteen of the old guard are set to take the green. “I don’t think the field has ever been deeper,” I tell her. “Except maybe ‘03. Rookie of the Year came down to three points then, I think? Or no, was it...who won it then? Axler. Right. The one who started that band.”

She just giggles and shuffles over to me. “Hey, why don’t we go somewhere cool after this? I know the security people.”

Magnolia County Raceway winds up taking 34 minutes to get to, if you count traffic out of the parking lot in LA. It’s so dark now that we can see the lightning bugs’ glows at the other end of the track, so quiet we can hear their chatters, but the staff lets her through the gate quick after some autographs.

The lights click on, the starters’ stand beckons over the dirt as though it has stayed late just for her. I park in a pit stall just off 4, eyes fixed on her rear wheels. Waiting for them to roar.

But she turns to me. “Well...come on!”

I put myself into first, and at five miles an hour I slink onto the dirt. The cushion is fresh-dusted along the outside wall from the hornet races and super six races and street stock races a few hours ago. The tire marks still feel warm. Each one keeps going, going, up into the far turn and onto the backstretch and low and high and deep and shallow. Each one is a decision. A pure impulse.

“The first time I tried this...Mr. McQueen said ‘turn right to go left.’”

I look up without a word, not understanding. Then back at her, the smooth yellow that cuts the wind every week. The blue 51. Blue 51.

I breathe and plant my wheels. 

A dust cloud whips up behind her and she’s off, her tires gripping the dirt ferocious and decisive into 1 and I’m sure she’s going too hard but she nails the entry, the ease off the throttle, the dive, the sideways drift so wildly brave that I can almost see her whole beaming face from here.

We didn’t bring anything for telemetry. I don’t know why her tire marks wound up the way they did, what her speed off the line was, what her RPM is going to be this lap but I ease in and follow the marks anyway, pick up more speed than I feel like I’ve had in years, feel all the dirt splashing my shiny silver rims, turn in.

Ten seconds later I can see again - I didn’t hit the inside wall but it’s all I can make out. That could have gone better.

She brakes hard into 1, pulls up to me and guffaws. “Didn’t I tell you how cool this would be?" 

I shake a couple of clods off, looking around. The stands, metal clattering in the wind. The sky. The little merchandise stands, the memory wall over in turn 3, the gate. And at her. Her confidence. Her 51.

I laugh back and point to it. “Numbers never lie.”


End file.
